IRiS Podcast: Struggles against subjection: the consequences of the criminalization of migration on migrants' everyday lives

Posted on 13 Feb 2014

Migration, Citizenship and Diversity: Questioning the Boundaries Seminar Series

Speaker: Dr Agnieszka Kubal (University of Oxford)

Criminalization of migration has over the last decade gained unprecedented focus in the migration, criminology and socio-legal literature. Recently, there have been some developments critically revisiting the criminalization thesis particularly with reference to the European experiences - criminal law might exists 'on the books' but quite often it is not actually enforced in immigration practice. Therefore, whilst the incorporation of criminal law into immigration domain serves mainly symbolic functions to demonstrate government’s firm grip over immigration control it also legitimizes the discourse presenting migrants as potential criminals, cheats and abusers (Bosworth and Guild 2008; Golash-Boza 2010; Pratt and Valverde 2002).

This begs the following question: how do migrants respond to this increasing conflation between criminal and immigration domains in the wider social context? How the official and public discourses over ‘crimmigrant bodies’ (Aas 2011) are reflected in migrants’ everyday life experiences? Do migrants resist, reproduce or redefine this criminal labelling? I grapple with these questions qualitatively investigating the experiences of 270 return migrants from four European countries – Norway, Netherlands, the UK and Portugal: migrants’ responses to the stigmatizing force of symbolic criminalisation do not always mean resistance (Coutin 2005), but quite often are placed on a continuum between the contestation and the reproduction of the stigma and the hegemony of the law.

Convened by Dr Nando Sigona and Dr Katherine Tonkiss.

Seminar series in collaboration with the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) and School of Government and Society.